


Sunlight on a Broken Column

by gentle_herald



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Far too many references, Gen, Henry V - Freeform, Imagined Alternative History, With a little Lord of the Rings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 14:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13483731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentle_herald/pseuds/gentle_herald
Summary: Commander Bolton goes home to Weymouth.





	Sunlight on a Broken Column

**Author's Note:**

> The lamp said,  
> "Four o’clock,  
> Here is the number on the door.  
> Memory!  
> You have the key,  
> The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.  
> Mount.  
> The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,  
> Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.” 
> 
> The last twist of the knife. 
> 
> \- Rhapsody on a Windy Night, T.S. Eliot

It's old hat, coming ashore and drawing lines, making rituals to tell you when it's safe to rest and, more than safe, when everything has been fully dealt with. For Bolton, it's the train. It needs to have pulled out of the station for him to be sure his men are handed off, his report given. Then he leans back against the uniform blue seat and sleeps.  

This is when his mind finally goes fuzzy and buzzing after the wrenched clarity of the past days and the endurance of debriefing at Dover. He can't fear missing his station now, though he should; he's tired enough to sleep twenty four hours if he let himself. There's always an alarm clock in his bag for this purpose. He sets it and lets go.  

Waking on a train is like waking at sea, except that there is never time onboard ship to savour the aimlessness of early morning. The rocking is the same, though, and the clanking of engines. He's painfully stiff, and when he experimentally stretches his back it aches, as do his neck and shoulders and temples. Clean June light is gliding in through the window, setting its dust in high relief: a stained glass shrine to ordinary things. It's been a week since he's seen sunlight so strong, what with the smoke and storm. It seems like a good start.  

Nearly no one is travelling towards England's extremities if they're travelling at all; it's the trains to London and bases that are crammed with evacuated soldiers.  His car is empty, but far off there is a low, rolling back and forth of voices. They're easy, with no command or attention in them. He doesn't want to know what they're saying, to involve himself in human drama by listening. The train could be a river, pouring him west and away from analysis like a glove is stripped off a hand.  

At Weymouth, he takes a cab to his house, noting the sandbags at corners, the barricades waiting ready against alley walls, the detritus of the reception parties and preparations for invasion. We can only retreat so far, he thinks wearily: this town is exposed.  

He climbs the stairs, hangs his greatcoat in the hall closet and his uniform in his bedroom closet with tender neatness, strips, and sleeps under sheets and blankets. 

 

Bolton wakes early, in full daylight. The day is already deciding if it will be hot and the sky is fragile blue as he walks down the hill to buy breakfast and groceries.  

He has just come from another seaside resort town not unlike this one. His road could become a funnel, a gauntlet of snipers and barricades. Perhaps he knows this better than the people he passes, but they all feel it: the coast is terribly vulnerable despite its concertina wire and anti-tank cubes and pillboxes. Once there were beacons all along here, lit when the Vikings, the Saxons, the Normans, the French, and the Spanish came. Later there were castles, device forts, Martello towers: the soft underbelly of England, mailed.  Almost nine hundred years on, we must fear Normandy again.  

He ducks in at the Ship and Tower. The boy behind the bar is a stranger. The owner is probably in France. Maybe Bolton evacuated him. Maybe he didn't make it to the extraction point.  

He orders breakfast: tomatoes and beans and sausage and strong tea, and eats it sitting as close as possible to the window, letting the pale light shimmer along the dark varnish of the table. It fills the dents like water running down rivulets in the sand. A newspaper is lying across from him, read and put sloppily back together. He reaches towards it and stops himself. He knows the bare bones already from his debriefing at Dover. The political and military situation. A situation is not emotion, not fear, not talk on the street. It is not enough. He takes the paper and refolds it before letting himself read.  

Miracle at Dunkirk, screams the headline.  _We will go on to the end._ And down the page,  _armed and guarded by the British fleet_. He half smiles at that, out of an old taste for praise, and stops himself. When you join the Navy you swear an oath. Thereafter, you can't make promises to civilians. Of course, the politicians choose to ignore this. In their position, he probably would as well.  

There is a boy dead. He died on one of the little ships. The ship wasn't hit, he – fell. Was pushed by a British soldier the crew pulled out of some wreckage. Shell shock, then. It's not only that it was a civilian killed that makes him hiss grief through his teeth, it's that the line of duty stretches so far. That the war doesn't need bullets and bombs and torpedoes to kill. It makes good men into weapons.  

His tea is cold. He drinks it anyways and goes out, continuing down the hill to the harbour. The beaches, the landing grounds. The sea could come up and grip us and drag us down. The enemy could come out of the sea or the sea could become the enemy. It holds no allegiance and harbours no mercy.  

 

He was right: the Navy did requisition his boat. The Lady Kate is muddy from soldiers' boots, with chips in her forest green paint and scratches in her walnut paneling, but otherwise unharmed. He starts hosing and polishing. It's methodical work, painstaking and blankly peaceful. When he pauses to stretch his back, he watches the low, golden mist burning off the harbour. The water is perfectly placid, but there are roiling purple clouds where land should be to the east. Back at Dunkirk, smoke will still be pluming up. He can't quite shake the memory of the dark at Dunkirk, the covering storm that protected them from the Stukas but seemed about to smash the little boats at any moment.  

At Dunkirk, water trapped him for the first time. He has always rowed, swum, piloted in attack and in defense. Even in escape. But to be pinned against the sea, with embarkment meaning to direct men into another death trap, was the first real failure he has known. Churchill reminded England that this was in fact a defeat, salvation barely scraped despite its enormity. Bolton needs no reminding. The operation was a success, the campaign a failure. He did what he went there to do and has been commended for it. Technically flawless, but the wider horror remains: he cannot control the sea, and without ships men are nothing and ships are not certain and the sea held him helpless and unsleeping.  

To be cleaning the Lady Kate feels like making reparations. It is an apology to the sea: I'm sorry I mistrusted you. He feels himself falling into the old pathetic fallacy. The navy taught him what it means to fight on the sea years ago, but out on the mole you don't pray, or every movement is a prayer. Sometimes it does seem like the elements are God's tool.  

There are footsteps on the wooden walkway behind him, echoing on the next boat's deck. Bolton hears the swish as it adjusts to the new weight and turns.  

It's the man from the newspaper article, the captain of the boat where the boy was killed. In the photographs, he stands on his boat's deck, watching the camera and presumably the swarm of reporters behind it with infinite sadness but no hostility. He puts out his hand: "Dawson." 

Bolton takes it. "Bolton." 

It's harder than it should be to start a conversation. Just moments ago he felt that he could stand up and watch his weariness and the dissatisfaction that always comes with it fall at his feet like broken eggshell. He would rise out of it, shake it off. In Dawson's presence he can't, though he wants to befriend this quietly precise man.  

Bolton says, "Pleased to meet you," smiles as warmly as he is able, and turns back to his work. They clean their boats in surprisingly companionable silence, very much together.  

 

It's the china that's most unfamiliar: its blankness, its lack of insignia. He boils water and climbs the stairs while he waits, standing in his darkened study and looking out over the spread town and harbour lights. West is Portland Harbour and the Naval Dockyard. He runs his eyes along the street below and imagines he can hear the grating roar of the night waves, but of course he can't from the top of a tall, narrow house in a town steeling itself for invasion. The lights below him go out one by one: blackout. He draws his own curtains and sits, feeling horribly exposed, until he releases himself by guessing that the kettle must have boiled.  

Tea in hand, he climbs the stairs again, feeling the empty space in the house around him, in the skeleton town.  

The dark shouts at him: warning, danger, you're exposed. There is so much space below you when you sail: almost as much, in its own way, as if you were a pilot. The way down is just as deadly, the thing that holds you secure as claustrophobic and tenuous.  

This is what he cannot do: let himself dwell on his experiences, other than those that can be made useful. It has been thirty-two years since he started basic officer training and in that time he has built himself strictures and disciplines. There is an ideal commanding officer he retreats into under stress, feeling duty settle on his shoulders and support his neck. It weighs him down and keeps him warm like his greatcoat. He's learned how long he can go under this pretense before his will gives out. That's when he goes home and determinedly does nothing but exist quietly. Under normal conditions he would be, he supposes, happy, but this war is everything but normal and it feels like a betrayal to find satisfaction in a profession which consists of caring for men so they can kill other men.  

He whispers, "And the peace of God, and the peace of God, and the peace of God which passeth all understanding." Low and fast: a drumbeat, shelling. And then, to fix in his mind that this in in fact a tenuous plea, "This is a prayer." 

 

He didn't dream while he was in France. He slept badly, tensely, and woke terrified, but that's what happens under fire. He lies down and stares into the unfocused dark.  

 

They are fleeing in a rout, the French marching behind them, because although they lost at Agincourt they still have enough strength to make for the coast. They will not surrender, and though they have lost the campaign they will not resign the war.  

They are cut off from Calais and make north, almost into the Low Countries: Dunkirk. Then there is the job of making sure they will not be overrun while they wait for ships to arrive from England. There is the task of calling those ships: Henry dispatches the Duke of Gloucester, undercover, to hire a boat to take him to England. Hire, or steal if he must, though Henry very carefully does not say this aloud. Or if he can slip through to Calais, one man passing through roads sentried and French-travelled, he'll be given those things freely by the English occupants of the town.  

Gloucester takes five canny men and the freshest horses they have. If he's seen he'll be captured; there is no way around it. And Henry, surveying the broad, grey beach with dunes running along its margin like ropey scars, hates the sight of the sea. There is nowhere for them to retreat, now. They sharpen what wood they can find and drive it into the sand.  

And then they wait.  

The men must scavenge for food in the surrounding countryside; there is no choice about that. Henry's earlier strictures on looting seem fatuous now. He fears he'd lose what control of his men he has left if he tried to enforce it, and yet there's nothing else for him to do on this beach at the edge of a France that was supposed to be his other than to see to his men. There's no more pressing task to be seen to and no better, either. These are men who followed him; they deserve safety and food and what lodging he can find them. And depending on how long they stay here, they need to keep some kind of condition. We might need to fight off the French, and the more they loot, the less willing and able they'll be. But if they don't find food, we'll be lost as well... 

 

He wakes thinking absurdly of heroic kings and glorious victories until he remembers who he is with a sick start.  

 

Bolton knows without considering it that he will go to the boy's funeral. It's not an official navy funeral, of course; there isn't even an on duty or assigned naval officer present. Bolton slips into the church and walks uncertainly up the aisle looking for a place. He still doesn't know if his uniform shows respect for the dead or terrible presumption; he fears imposing himself at a funeral where he doesn't belong or else snubbing them by not coming at all.  

Dawson comes up behind him with what is presumably his wife and son at his side and sits in Bolton's pew. It's more than long enough for four, and they're still a comfortable distance apart, but Dawson meets his eye and doesn't exactly smile, but gives a look of recognition and understanding. As Dawson turns away, his face is unreadable and his movements so very restrained. Bolton wonders what he is like without grief.  

Circles within circles. If he's King Henry to his men, then Dawson is Henry to his family and neighbours. He always hoped to be Fluellen, though, following the true disciplines of the wars.  _They killed the boys and the luggage_ , he thinks.  _They killed the boys..._  

 

Dawson sits at Bolton's kitchen table. He says, "The boy – George – wanted to come with us." It isn't an excuse or an apology, though Bolton wonders if he should be the one apologising. He wears the uniform, after all. In another second he can't fathom why the navy would hold any guilt for George's death, why the Crown would, why the soldier in the boat would if he was shell shocked, why the Germans would if it was the soldier who pushed George. The boy is dead, with a great, howling space around him where causation should be.  

He says, "It mattered to him." This is not a consolation. Bolton has seen many young men die for causes that mattered to them; they are dead just the same as the ones who died raging against the war.  

Dawson says, indicating himself, "John." 

"James." 

They sit with the clock loud on the dresser and wind rattling the windows like strafing.  

Very quietly, Bolton says, "I'm glad he did." 

"Until the funeral, I hadn't thought about the Great War in years," Bolton says at last. "How I stayed in the navy after it was over. How I justified it to myself. Maybe I justified it too much. " 

"If England falls, none of that will matter," says Dawson.  

"Except it will, always." 

"Yes. And I'm glad of that, to know that some things, no matter how honourable or awful, won't be gone. Won't have been wasted." 

 "Too much faith leads a man to the slaughter," says Bolton. "Too little slaughters him. Which is better?" 

Dawson says, "Hope and love, then." 

Bolton says, "We did get them off the beach." He meets Dawson's eye. "It's like the English lost Agincourt." Dawson flinches and Bolton jerks to apologize and stops himself.  

"There was a moment," he says, "near the end, when a Stuka was diving for the mole. And there was nothing we could do about it, so I stood there and wondered what the moment of being blown up felt like. And I wondered if belief mattered, one way or another, out there at the edge of everything. If it was enough to want lead my men wisely and well, if that kind of decency is impossible in a war, if I am a fool for telling myself there's a right thing to do.  

"The Spitfire pilot who shot the Stuka down ran out of petrol but he stayed in his plane instead of bailing while he was over our bit of the beach.  There are moments in war that make you love men. I saw why he did it – for the same reason I wouldn't duck. You compose yourself and face death bravely.  It's the first thing they try to teach you when you join up and the last thing you learn – if you're lucky enough to learn it. If you're unlucky enough to need to.  And you don't do this because there's a morality to it but because it's the best thing to do. Somehow those can be separate." He stops, realizing what he's just said.  

Dawson says, "I forgave them when they tried to keep us out of this war. It's alright." 

And Bolton says, wonderingly, "George believed." 

"So did my Alec," says Dawson.  

"The problem is that I do too," says Bolton. "That I maybe don't want the truth if it's that the sea is going to swallow us up and the only way to be a good man is to be a pacifist and let the Germans subjugate us." 

"The sea coming to swallow us up?" asks Dawson, haltingly. 

"The Germans." 

"I've dreamed that the sea is rising, a great green-black wall, rolling over the harbour and streets and all of England." 

They sit listening for water on a shuddering impulse.  

Dawson says, "At Agincourt the English did what they needed to do. They might not have had the best reason but they did it and surely there's some honour in that. And here we are against a destroyer who would take us all."  

Even doubt is a luxury to be rationed, like eggs or sugar.  _He that outlives this day and comes safe home..._  If he outlives the war, he'll be old enough that he needs to retire. He doesn't know what he'll do then. He is grateful to have been able to serve well, but the boys on the mole and on his destroyer are the only sons he'll ever have and he mourns them.  

The sea is a dark gulf, and there are U boats in it, like wolves in a forest. It doesn't bear thinking about. The slimy, suffocating deep might burst in through the windows at any moment.  

"Christ," says Bolton.  

Neither of them can move or think of words; they so rarely get to admit these things to themselves that doubt is a dry, foreign land. The world is huge and awful without someone to care for, but it would be an insult to comfort each other too much, to soften the truth for the other or put on blinders.  

Dawson says, "In the end it's the men, isn't it. It's what you can do for them. "  

"Yes," Bolton says, and weeps.  

Dawson watches him put his head down on the table and give himself up silently. He thinks of his own kitchen and how much older Peter seems since Alec died, and how much younger, too; how the gap between father and younger son seems wider than before and his son more fragile. He thinks about his wife, who is doing her best not to hover over her remaining child, and Peter, who still clearly has moments when he wants to run and tell Alec something and then realizes he can't.  

The sea is flooding up the road, reaching out of the harbour to pull them in. It can't be driven back with Bolton's Navy's concertina wire or mines. Darkness unescapable is coming. He doesn't cry but huddles into himself and looks with awe at the man across the table from him – and more than awe, something he hopes is love.  

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot.


End file.
